Transcript

Carl Smith: So from artificial floating nations, to artificial teachers. Australian school students have been slipping down the world education rankings in recent years, especially in STEM subjects.

In April, David Gonski released a new report, arguing the current mass education model was the problem. He proposed a solution: personalised learning, which would let students work at their own pace. Our Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has thrown his weight behind the idea.

But what would that look like in classrooms? Well, last year Sir Anthony Seldon, vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham, told the British Science Festival that AI machines will take over from teachers within 10 years, because they'll be able to tailor personalised education programs for students. But are AI teachers the key to personalised learning and the future of education?

Secretary of New South Wales Department of Education, Mark Scott says AI software won't be replacing teachers, but it will be assisting them, and he wants to see students using this technology in his state's classrooms.

Mark Scott: I think one of the great mysteries for a teacher is what a child has learnt. I see technology as bringing a revolution in assessment for teachers. Just as we've seen the technology bring a revolution in medical practice, so that a medical practitioner or a specialist in medicine has a very detailed personalised understanding of the medical condition of each person who comes before them through good assessments and good testing that has been developed, I think technology provides a great opportunity for us to be able to, in a low-stress, low-pressure way, be able to test where each child is up to in his or her learning, to understand what the gaps are, and then in almost a big data sense as well, to give us insights across the system as a whole.

Carl Smith: Do you imagine beginning to roll out some of these systems, trialling them in New South Wales schools over the coming years?

Mark Scott: Yes, so we are doing a number of things. This year we will be creating a catalyst lab where we will be looking to target small-scale experiments, investing seed money but actually doing these pilot programs. And we are in discussions with major technology companies and with business partners who want to help us create an environment where we can experiment and where we can scale.

Carl Smith: Okay but what is an AI teacher?

Despite the image it may conjure, it's not a robot standing in front of a class, it's interactive software that individual students use on a tablet, computer or phone. Unlike earlier educational programs which just randomly churn through a bank of questions, the AI engine running this software learns from each student, adapts content based on their mistakes or how long they take to answer a question, and it figures out which lessons to send them to next.

Rose Luckin: So most of the systems that exist now, the student is very much interacting through a fairly standard interface, a screen based interface. The student is completing an activity and the system analyses what that student is doing. It may also have analysed millions of students previously and provides feedback that is very personalised to that individual student.

Carl Smith: Professor Rose Luckin from University College London is a learning scientist who specialises in educational software and AI education technology. She says AI-driven programs can adjust their learning styles based on students, giving them a more personalised experience and letting them work at their own pace.

Rose Luckin: A lot of the way that these technologies are built is based on work that has been done over many decades in what's called the learning sciences—psychology, education, sociology, neuroscience now as well—about how people learn. So it's very much the student sits with their piece of technology, whether it's the tablet or the screen or the phone, and they interact with the system around something they are trying to learn, and the system adapts the instruction.

Carl Smith: You might have already seen visions of how this technology may look one day. For example, in a recent Star Trek film, a young Spock is shown inside a pod, with swirling equations and questions and an artificial teacher quizzing him.

Do you think we are anywhere near a situation like that on the ground in schools here on Earth?

Rose Luckin: I don't think we are on the ground, but I think we have the technology to build that kind of system, if that's what we decide we want to do. But that is only a very small part of teaching would be what I would say. So basically the kind of system that we can build using artificial intelligence is very good at tutoring in classic academic subjects. So particularly science, technology, engineering, maths, but also language learning. We've got some very good evidence around language learning, so we know that we can build artificially intelligent tutors that can tutor as well as a human teacher when that human teacher is teaching to a group. We cannot match one-to-one human, but how many people get one-to-one human teaching?

Carl Smith: And what's the teacher's role in this setting?

Rose Luckin: Well, that's a really good question. A lot of these systems don't look at that. When I first started doing research in this area, I came in from a background of having taught, and I was horrified that the systems that we were building, and I'm talking 20 to 25 years ago, so pre-World Wide Web, and the teacher was completely ignored. Now there's a little bit acknowledgement of the teacher but a lot of the time these systems are thinking of the students' individual study and I think that's where we need to put a lot more thought about, what you like, what the ecosystem of the classroom is and what role these systems can have in that. And perhaps one of the key roles that the artificial intelligence can play is by giving human teachers that nuanced information about the student's performance.

Carl Smith: So, we may see AI education software taking over some of a teacher's role, but the teacher is still working in tandem with the software. This is exactly the approach that Brazilian AI Education company Geekie has taken. There are several companies already testing AI programs in schools, and Geekie is now being used across much of Brazil, reaching 5 million students in the past year.

Geekie's Engineering Manager is Leonardo Carvalho.

Leonardo Carvalho: Teachers will always have their space at schools, there's just a shift in their job. They are not just giving the lectures, they are more facilitating. The performance of students tells a lot about what are the gaps they need to fill in order to improve their learning, and artificial intelligence is used to gather that data and then compare to the curriculum and find the best path of learning given the student's profile. So we try to understand what are the best possible paths of learning for each student.

Carl Smith: So what does a Geekie classroom look like?

Leonardo Carvalho: So we have traditional classrooms, but there are specific moments when students gather together in groups where they can help each other and our teachers can give lectures more specific to a smaller group. And there is also another kind of classroom where students are working by themselves on the computer and the teacher is just facilitating the process. So teachers helping students in their individual needs. So there are these different setups.

Carl Smith: One of the schools using Geekie's software is Colégio Perfil, in Bahia.

Two of the 15-year-old students from the school, Roama and David, are using the software to learn English. They sent me these voice recordings from their classroom:

Roama: Well, on an average day of school the teacher normally writes on the board, he doesn't stop doing that, but he also uses Geekie, like checks homework, he sees what we did wrong, and what he needs to improve in class.

David: You can access it everywhere, as long as you have your phone with you.

Roama: As the people are changing, the technology is also changing with the school. The worst bits is that you can't really run away from homework because it says when you don't do it.

Carl Smith: David and Roama said they haven't seen any change in their grades…yet. But their English teacher Rafael says the software has let him easily pinpoint areas to work on for each student, and across the whole group.

Rafael: They are following the class through the app all the time, and then you can understand better the progress of your students. My role is like being a facilitator. The students want to achieve something and I am there to make them achieve that.

Carl Smith: So, with the app collecting data on students' strengths and weakness, the teacher can then step in to help an individual, a group, or the whole class.

Leonardo Carvalho, from Geekie:

Leonardo Carvalho: Collecting data is really about knowing people better. Teachers have a really important role in what to do with this data.

Carl Smith: I imagine it eases the load of marking on teachers as well, doesn't it, things like assessment and tests.

Leonardo Carvalho: Yes, it really changes the work. You take off the burden of some bureaucratic job and let teachers really focus on teaching and understanding the needs and provide different assessments or feedback for each student.

Carl Smith: If you're measuring their abilities and how they are going in certain parts of their education, I'm just wondering how you keep that data private.

Leonardo Carvalho: All the data that goes inside the analysis is anonymous. So the student information is just available to the student himself and teachers and parents. Of those that go to the algorithms will drop all the specific information of the student.

Carl Smith: Rose Luckin from Imperial College London has been keenly watching the rise of these AI Education technology companies, often providing advice for them, and for school systems. So, does she think the programs work?

Rose Luckin: The biggest factor in how any intervention (and let's think about this as an intervention in education) works, the biggest factor is always context, and that can be the students' home context, their background, it can be the individual teacher in that classroom, it can be the school management team in a school, it can be any number of other things. It could be the level of the technology and the infrastructure in the school. And so there's a whole set of factors that make a difference as to whether that intervention is well received or not and whether it actually helps the teachers and learners in that school. So, 'very variable' is the answer to your question because it depends enormously on all of those factors.

Where it works best is where the teachers and the students have very much been part of the decision-making process about bringing that technology in, where the teachers have been well trained, where they understand what the technology is capable of and what it's not, where there is a clear discussion about what role that technology should play.

Carl Smith: Kids that use this kind of technology, what's their reaction, from what you've seen?

Rose Luckin: I think they find it very supportive because it is one-to-one tutoring, it is adaptive in a way that it's hard for teachers who are throughout the world increasingly coping with much larger numbers of students, whatever section of education they are in. So provided it's used wisely, not for all of their education, for a part of it, provided it is part of an ecosystem where they get plenty of interaction with humans away from the screen or away from the audio interface, plenty of enrichment through all the activities that are not just about learning a particular subject, the reaction is positive. And I think the students I've seen find it very valuable.

Carl Smith: And how does she weigh up when to use this technology in schools?

Rose Luckin: So the pros are that the AI doesn't get tired, it's very consistent, it doesn't fall prey to bias, which all of us humans do, whether we like to acknowledge it or not, it has huge potential to provide teachers for the millions of children in the world who don't have a teacher at all. There is a huge potential to provide specialist tutoring in areas that a school cannot afford to have a teacher to teach. We could be giving every child in the world the best tutor in the world, in a very narrow and particular way. And if it's a machine learning system it's constantly updating its knowledge, hopefully of teaching as well as the subject area. And I should say of course there's the cost issue because technology doesn't have sick days. You might have a high outlay to start off with but actually the maintenance is relatively low, though of course there's the question about students having the devices through which they use these systems.

I think the negative is partly to do with how we make decisions about the role that those technologies should play. I think if education policymakers and decision-makers see those systems as an economical solution to a problem of expensive teachers, teacher shortages, that's quite dangerous because all of those systems are tarred with the major disadvantage that they can only teach a certain sort of thing. So yes, it frees up teachers to do the things that teachers are really, really good at, things like acknowledging the role of emotions, things like what I call the meta level, so understanding yourself.

I think there are also some enormous risks around ethics and privacy, and who makes decisions about who gets this technology, how much we let the technology make decisions for us, what happens to people's data. That worries me a lot. So yes, a huge quagmire of complication I think there. But it needs to be talked about.

Carl Smith: Finally, when will we see artificial education technology in Australian classrooms? Mark Scott:

Mark Scott: We need to change. We need to change the way we teach, change the tools that we use, change the operating environment in our classrooms to ensure our young people are really ready for the challenges that they will face.

Carl Smith: But he says a big part of that is supporting teachers to use new technology.

Mark Scott: The key investment is in teaching, and how teachers change the way they teach to take advantage of the opportunities that the technology delivers. Technology in its own right, simply buying class sets of technology or making sure there is fast broadband in a school does not improve learning outcomes for young people. But technology is a vital and exciting tool that great teachers are going to be able to use to revolutionise education in our schools in the years ahead.

Robyn Williams: Mark Scott, former managing director of the ABC, now head of education in New South Wales. And that Science Show, Floating Cities and Wired Classrooms, was presented by Carl Smith.

Guests

Mark Scott

Secretary of the NSW Department of Educationhttps://education.nsw.gov.au/about-us/our-people-and-structure/the-secretary